Real Moviegoers Don’t Care About Rotten Tomatoes

In a recent essay in the Hollywood Reporter, the director Martin Scorsese criticized the combined effects of box-office pressure and consumer grading on serious filmmaking.

Photograph by JB Lacroix / WireImage via Getty

Martin Scorsese has forgotten more films than I’ve seen and seen more
films than I’ve heard of. His knowledge of movies is vast, as a viewer,
and, obviously, as a filmmaker. He’s been making features for almost
fifty years, and the authority of his experience in the business isn’t
to be gainsaid. But he misses the mark in a recent
essay in the Hollywood Reporter, in which he inveighs against two conjoined
trends—the widespread reporting of box-office results and the grading of
movies by consumers on CinemaScore and by critics on Rotten Tomatoes—and
blames it for “a tone that is hostile to serious filmmakers.” In
particular, he contends that this hostile environment is worsening “as
film criticism written by passionately engaged people with actual
knowledge of film history has gradually faded from the scene.” He also writes that directors are “reduced to a content manufacturer and
the viewer to an unadventurous consumer.”

I think that film criticism is, over all, better than ever, because, with
its new Internet-centrism, it’s more democratic than ever and many of
the critics who write largely online are more film-curious than ever.
Anyone who is active on so-called Film Twitter—who sees links by
critics, mainly younger critics, to his or her work—can’t help but be
impressed by the knowledge, the curiosity, and the sensibility of many
of them. Their tastes tend to be broader and more daring than those of
many senior critics on more established publications. And, even if
readers of the wider press aren’t reading these more obscure critics,
the critics whom general readers read are often reading those young
critics (and if they’re not, it shows). This is, of course, not
universally so, any more than it ever was. The Internet is democratic in
all directions—it’s also available to writers of lesser knowledge,
duller taste, and dubious agendas, and it may be their work that’s
advertised most loudly—but the younger generation of critics is present
online and there for the finding.

But I’m inclined to approach the phenomenon that Scorsese is describing
differently—to work backward from the movies that are getting made,
shown, and released, and to determine the nature of the current-day
movie environment on that basis. Scorsese talks about the last twenty
years; let’s scroll down the list of major releases in 1997, the year of
“Titanic.” What are the masterworks that couldn’t be made or released
now? “L. A. Confidential”? “Boogie Nights”? “Amistad”? “Starship
Troopers”? “Jackie Brown”? “The Ice Storm”? The best films of 2017, such
as “Get Out,” “Good Time,” “A Ghost Story,” “Song to Song,” and “Hermia
& Helena,” are better—more original, more daring at the fundamental level of the image, of dramatic form, of the definition of performance,
of the very stuff of the cinema (and that’s even leaving out the
wondrously original strains of nonfiction cinema, such as “Rat Film,”
“Strong Island,” and “Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?”). But what
distinguishes them from the best films of 1997 is that they weren’t made
by studios. Rather, they were made by independent producers who
furnished budgets much lower than the ones that leading directors worked
with two decades ago.

The 2017 movies also, for the most part, reached far fewer viewers in
movie theatres. “Get Out” has made lots of money, taking in a hundred
and seventy-five million dollars at the domestic box-office (on a budget
of four and a half million dollars); “A Ghost Story” has earned
approximately a hundredth as much, taking in $1.6 million (but its
production budget was . . . a hundred thousand dollars). But I agree
with Scorsese: these box-office statistics are utterly irrelevant; “Get
Out” and “A Ghost Story” are peers at the very height of the art of
movies. Working with scant budgets frees filmmakers to follow their
strongest artistic impulses and allows their films to be distinctive,
personal, original. It’s all to the good that some of these films, such
as “Moonlight” (which cost four million dollars to make and took in
twenty-seven million dollars in domestic ticket sales, and another
thirty-seven million dollars internationally) and “Get Out,” have also
been very profitable.

I know of another such box-office-successful film, one that I consider
to be among the best of all in recent years, and it’s directed by Martin
Scorsese: “The Wolf of Wall Street.” It was an expensive film to make—its budget was reportedly a hundred million dollars—and it took in
a hundred and sixteen million dollars in the United States, and two
hundred and seventy-five million dollars internationally. Yet its budget
didn’t come from the studio (Paramount) that released it but, rather, from
independent financiers. I think it’s no coincidence that Scorsese,
liberated from studio producers, also liberated his artistic energies
and made one of his very best films.

In other words, the trend in criticism is the same as in movies: for the
most part, the best of what’s available isn’t found in the so-called
mainstream. That fact has economic implications, of exactly the sort
that are reflected in the Safdie brothers’ extraordinary film “Good Time.” The film was made because its star, Robert Pattinson, who had
box-office success and gained his stardom working in an altogether more
popular and less artistically ambitious vein, asked the brothers to make
a film with him; they then wrote it with him in mind, and his
involvement secured the financing that they needed to make it. The best
filmmakers are often not getting the checks for directing movies that
they might have expected decades ago. (Wes Anderson and Sofia Coppola
are among the major filmmakers who have directed TV commercials in
recent years while they were between movies.) It’s exactly the movies
that are made on low budgets and put into limited release that are more
or less immune to the oversimplifications of grades on Rotten Tomatoes
or CinemaScore. It’s hard to imagine that the viewers who are interested
in “Good Time” or “Beach Rats” or “Columbus” would be anything but
amused by such scores, and that they would be guided by such artificial
consensus than by reading reviews by critics whose sensibility they find
related to their own.

I don’t blame Scorsese for not being aware of what’s going on in
criticism and, for that matter, in movies. He spent most of his career
in one system and, though he has changed systems as a producer of
movies, he may not have done so as a consumer of them. The very nature
of movie viewing, as he says in the essay, has changed—he cites the
over-all switch from 35-mm. film projection to video as a boon for
independents but a “real loss” for viewers. What he doesn’t mention is
that theatres themselves are secondary to audiences for movies. Though
streaming services don’t provide numbers, it’s pretty clear that more
people are watching movies at home than in theatres.

I went looking online for the box-office results for the best film of 2016, “Little Sister”; the answer I found, though not quite accurate—zero dollars—is an apt metaphor. The movie’s theatrical release
was extremely limited, though it did have one. But that release happened
concurrently with its release on Amazon and iTunes, where many more
people have undoubtedly seen it. For the record, “Little Sister” has a
ninety-two-per-cent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with favorable reviews
from critics at such major publications as the New York Times, the Los
Angeles Times, and The Nation. It also received favorable reviews
from the aforementioned perceptive critics writing for smaller, often
Internet-only publications.

What Scorsese doesn’t exactly say, but what, I think, marks a generation
gap in movie thinking that his essay reflects, is the appearance of an
increasing divide between artistically ambitious films and Hollywood
films—the gap between the top box-office films and the award winners.
(For instance, from an absolute perspective of profitability,
“Moonlight” was a great success, and also an Oscar winner; but it was
only at the ninety-second slot in domestic box-office for 2016
releases.) For filmmakers ready to work on lower budgets, the gap is
irrelevant. The filmmakers whose conceptions tend toward the spectacular
are the ones whose styles may, literally, be cramped by shrinking
budgets—filmmakers such as Scorsese and Wes Anderson, whose work has
both an original and elaborate sense of style and a grand historical
reach.

There’s a paradox in the current state of moviemaking. The very notion
of the mainstream, which, in the age of classic Hollywood, was defined
negatively by everyone and everything it excluded, is now a feedback
screech: massive studio marketing campaigns for movies create a
widespread public awareness that prompts editors to commission stories
connected to them on the assumption that readers, knowing about the
movies and its celebrities, will want to read about them, and the
popularity stoked by the press (sometimes) drives viewers to the
movies—the success of which encourages studios to re-up with the same
people and to launch campaigns for their movies.

This can go several ways: one way, seen for “The Wolf of Wall Street,”
is when the merits of a movie, amplified by vigorous discussion in the
press, provides the metaphorical sense of a three-way conversation
between filmmakers, journalists, and the public (who do their “talking”
by buying tickets). Another way, seen for Darren Aronofsky’s “Mother!,”
is that journalists discuss the movie vigorously and the public stays
home, at which point journalists convey the miserable sense of talking
to each other or shouting into a void, and their enterprise seems to be
vanity. (That’s the situation that Scorsese decries regarding critical
discussion of Aronofsky’s film.) Yet Scorsese is right in both
directions—the ballyhoo of successful movies, the sense of being in the
cultural conversation, sometimes works for bad movies and also for good
ones, just as the vigorous discussion of movies that aren’t hits is, in
the long term, equally irrelevant to the good ones as to the bad ones.
The only reason why the commercial failure of “Mother!” seems like a big
deal at all is that it was sold by the studio and discussed by
journalists as a potential, perhaps even a likely, hit. Its artistry,
like that of other notable films that were box-office failures (most
famously, “Vertigo”), will be long discussed; its unprofitability will
be a mere footnote.

The over-all separation of the best of modern filmmaking from the
financial heights of studio filmmaking is a way of breaking this
cycle—of bringing movies into the world with less advance marketing, of
counting less on celebrity-driven journalism to foster attention, of
yielding prominence to critics more likely to be attuned to the tones
and merits of non-Hollywood-centric films. The reflection on pop-culture
phenomena such as the box-office and Rotten Tomatoes isn’t a matter of
aesthetics but of armchair sociology, of political theatre, of amateur
psychology. It’s fun, and it’s sometimes revealing, but—exactly as
Scorsese suggests—it’s not a matter of the art of movies, and the
mistake isn’t that of Rotten Tomatoes; it’s of critics who can’t tell
the difference between a movie’s “grade” and its inherent qualities.

There’s a long-standing strand of criticism that calls filmmakers to
financial responsibility—that argues on behalf of popular styles and
traditions on the grounds that filmmaking is expensive and that
filmmakers have a responsibility to their backers to make films that
will earn their budgets and then some. The result has been not only the
critical grading on a curve of films that offer only a modicum of
originality but a boatload of ticket sales but also the furious
critical rejection of movies that are very expensive to make, wildly
original in artistry, and commercially dubious prospects. On the one
hand, Scorsese is absolutely right that a movie’s financial success is
utterly irrelevant to its artistic merits; on the other hand, these
critics have lost the basis for their claim: it no longer costs a lot of
money to make a movie, or even to get it shown. Most of the best movies
now are made frugally and released quietly—and if critics and their
editors don’t pay attention to these movies because they’re not
advertised heavily or released widely, they’re merely perpetuating a
fallacy, an illusion.

It’s a convenient illusion—those who got their start twenty or more
years ago, when studio movies were the center of action, have had their
ideas and their tastes formed by them. Now that other kinds of movies
altogether have taken center stage, not commercially but aesthetically,
these critics, petrified in nostalgia and with their minds frozen in
earlier Hollywood traditions, simply don’t know what to make of them.
Scorsese isn’t petrified in nostalgia—his artistry, to this day, is
as forward-looking as any—but he’s unintentionally providing
intellectual ammunition to those who are, and who are often overlooking
the very kinds of movies that are currently building the kind of
cinematic future that Scorsese himself hopes for.

Video

The Safdie Brothers’ Cinematic Beginnings

The brothers and co-directors Josh and Benny Safdie showed promise well before the release, this month, of their critically acclaimed thriller "Good Time." Their 2010 film, "Daddy Longlegs," a largely autobiographical tale of turbulent New York childhoods, pulses with trouble, excitement, and discovery.